A communication system for national security and public safety need to achieve two basic requirements: area coverage and reliability. Both these requirements can be a matter of life and death in an emergency situation. The system must provide coverage where an accident occurs, which may be anywhere. This will require coverage to be extended into sparely populated areas and wilderness areas that today often have no coverage. In Europe the population coverage of 3G is in the order of 80-90% while the area coverage is hardly 40%. To provide the ubiquitous coverage required by a NSPS (National Security and Public Safety) system, a large number of base stations must be deployed in remote areas.
In remote areas it will be difficult to provide system backhaul at a reasonable cost. Digging down fiber to every new base station in the wilderness will be impossible so backhaul will to a large extent have to be wireless. This will make the backhaul connection less reliable since e.g. a heavy storm can cut off the remote base station from the network temporarily. At the same time we know that accidents typically happen, and thereby the need for reliable emergency services is most important, when the weather is bad. Hence, for a NSPS system it is not acceptable to rely only on e.g. a single microwave backhaul connection that might stop working during a heavy rainfall.
The OSS (Operations Support Systems) of the mobile network is capable of detecting if a base station lost its connection to the rest of the network. In such a case, the OSS system first tries to resolve the problem via configuration, if it does not help, then operational/technician team should go to the site to recover the connections of the faulty offline base station. This procedure takes far too long time to be useful in an emergency situation. To fix base stations in remote areas where the traffic is low typically has low priority and it can take several days before the problem is resolved.
When a base station has lost its connection to the rest of the mobile network users cannot send emergency calls/messages, even if the particular base station is at least partially in operation. The suggested technology disclosed here aim to resolve this problem.